


Windows down when this is guiding you

by zombieboyband



Category: Drive (2011)
Genre: Dog - Freeform, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-25
Updated: 2011-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-28 02:53:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zombieboyband/pseuds/zombieboyband
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A guy, a car, a dog, and the open road.</p><p><i>The electro-pop's on and he's mostly stopped bleeding, so: good enough.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Windows down when this is guiding you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lynnmonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynnmonster/gifts).



The electro-pop's on and he's mostly stopped bleeding, so: good enough. His gloves are stiff with dried blood, cracked over the bends in his hands, the skin of the knuckles showing through the holes stained red. The jacket's trashed, made now of quilted grime, though the scorpion on the back still gleams.

Still, he's cleaner than the dog he finds when he pulls over to the side of the road.

With a soft grunt, still cradling his stomach, he gets out--even he needs to stretch sometimes and there's no peopled place to be for sprawling miles--and looks the dog over. It's some lanky mutt, standing maybe two feet fall, covered in wet mud and dried blood, but it looks over hopefully and starts to get up.

"Down," he says hastily to the dog, guessing, "--boy. Down."

The dog goes down, filthy head resting on his paws.

The lanky guy driver looks over at him--he really isn't in the mood for more injuries right now; he's not sure his body can afford them--but then approaches slowly.

The dog wags his tail cautiously.

They look at each other for a few minutes.

"You running from something?" he asks, quietly, "Like me?"

There's nowhere to go but away, and the dog looks half starved and pretty wrecked. Sympathizing is pretty easy.

He lowers a still gloved hand, lets the dog sniff the leather, his skin. Warm and tentative, the dog's tongue licks at his knuckles. A head scratch and he takes his hand away: all the blood probably isn't good for a dog to eat.

His hands are pretty dirty.

So's the rest of him, really.

After wiping off his own face, he ends up shrugging off his wrecked jacket and using it to towel off the worst of the mud, then clicking his tongue to invite the dog in through an opened car door. Dog bounds in, then sits quietly, gazing out the window, then back at this new human.

He leaves the jacket at the side of the road, shredded, stained.

Sometimes scorpions shed.

++

A shot of minimal medical attention later, shedding seems even easier.

++

Once he's fair sure he can eat without bleeding all over his food, he stops by a taco stand that's stranded in basically nowhere.

He leans on the hood of the car, lets the dog eat some ground meat out of his hand, sharing.

++

The only bit of trouble is that he's a little too tired from--

everything

\--what he guesses is healing, so he sleeps a little too deep when he's crashed out at this truck stop almost-motel. Someone jimmies the flimsy lock open, slides into the room: this is a mistake.

The dog leaps off the floor, snarling, and when the threat doesn't work, he jumps for the throat.

There's a few screams, but the situation is under control. There isn't a body to get rid of; whoever got in didn't stay in for long, but was in condition fit enough to run away.

"Good boy," he tells the dog, as they pad out into the night, back to the car, to find somewhere else to be, somewhere new to sleep.

++

It's a few days later before he has time and distance enough to feel safe enough for sliding in front of a grocery store cashier and asking,

"Do you know what dogs eat?"

++

The dog, as it turns out, is basically silent. This suits him fine. They sleep curled up together in the backseat in Wal-Mart parking lots (safe because everyone does it and so nobody looks for you), stop driving a couple of times a day to go on walks, eat dry kibble and stale gas station sandwiches on the road.

Under all the dirt and blood, the dog turns out to be mostly yellow, fur short and neat, almost like he's a dark blond, too. The dog can't tell him where the blood came from and he can't tell the dog why he was bleeding, so it works out.

++

Sometimes he feeds the dog one of the ham sandwiches he gets out of vending machines.

++

At some point, he gets a leash and a collar. It seems like the thing to do.

++

He'd share toothpicks with the dog, but that doesn't seem like it would work. Sometimes the dog picks up a stick when they go on their walks, weaving between the trees in those strange stretches of almost-woods on the high way, and that seems close enough.

++

They're still driving, every day, most of the day. The direction is away, and the ETA is sometime. New songs leak through the speakers and the weather changes, but it's not time to stop yet.

He can't go to any of the obvious places. No one's looking, he's just about sure, but he can't be obvious. Soon it'll be time to start over, maybe in the most obvious place of all, maybe just somewhere.

++

When he's in cities, briefly, he walks the dog down sidewalks and doesn't notice how women watch him, some smiling and then glancing away, some just smiling. It's the barest shadow of what shone like a lighthouse out of Irene's eyes when she'd told him one day,

"You're so good with kids,"

and he'd said,

"You think so?"

"Benicio likes you," Irene had pointed out.

"Maybe Benicio's just a good kid," he'd said, "Likes everyone."

And she'd just smiled.

++

Maybe he doesn't notice the soft eyes that follow him, but he knows where everyone is standing, how close, who could be hiding a gun--most people could be--who's standing close enough to a hard brick wall.

He watches the exits, wherever he goes.

Things like that, he notices.

++

Sometimes the dog whuffles in his sleep, a worried, lost sound, so he nudges the dog awake and then they climb over each other to resettle, soaking up each other's warm, before dropping back into sleep.

++

Maybe he should change directions, drive into Canada. Something like that.

++

Maybe he doesn't even need to be driving anymore, but it's just what he does, wants to do.

++

"I never used to need company," he says one day, suddenly, as they drive along an especially tricky piece of road on a clear day, "But once you spend time around someone--"

He cuts himself off. He's talking to a _dog_. And he's thinking about Irene.

"You make a little easier, is all," he finishes.

The dog noses into his arm, then drops down to curl into a small circle in the seat, as close as he can get.

++

"Sharks have to swim all the time," Benicio told him once, serious like only a child can be, "they swim all the time or they die."

"That sounds tiring," Irene had remarked, taking away a plate full of cookie crumbs to the kitchen.

"But they're built to swim," he'd said, out of nowhere, "It's just what they do."

"Still hard," Benicio said, legs kicking at empty air, landing on the chair.

"Maybe," he'd said, "maybe."

++

On one of his walks, this guy (dark hair; beard; olive skin--he tries not to remember Standard) lets out a long, admiring whistle and asks,

"What kind of dog is that?"

He thinks about it.

"A good dog," he answers.

"Best kind," the new guy says, nodding as he leaves.

++

It's this beautiful day and he ducks into a second hand shop, just to see.

There it is: still quilted, still silk. Different symbol on the back. A little beat up, but good enough.

He slips on his new jacket.

++

Eventually, he stops driving. For now.

**Author's Note:**

> Confession: I pictured my own dog the whole time, because I constantly tell him he is the "Ryan Gosling of dogs." Cough, um. HAPPY YULE?


End file.
